Before #DeleteFacebook, others resisted the social network

1of2Electronic Frontier Foundation researcher Gennie Gebhart advises people to change their settings on Facebook to ensure maximum privacy.Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle

2of2Privacy and security researcher Gennie Gebhart at the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s offices in San Francisco.Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle

Whether because of occupation, age or gender, there are untold numbers of Facebook users who have distrusted the social network to protect their privacy long before the Cambridge Analytica controversy surfaced.

And even though they may not be joining the campaign to #DeleteFacebook and remove their data completely, several Facebook members interviewed for this story say they are taking the scandal seriously. Some have already taken steps to try to lock down their private information as much as possible.

For Gennie Gebhart, thinking about online security and privacy is now “more or less my full-time job.”

But she started in library and information sciences. Her work took her to Thailand, where she helped with technology access for marginalized communities, often by providing cell phones. In 2014, a government coup changed everything.

Suddenly, people went missing or turned up dead, and she said she realized those cell phones had become “people-surveillance devices.”

“Overnight, I went from someone who was working on access to someone who was working on security,” she said.

Her research led her to Facebook, which she said was often “at the center of social and civic life.”

Gebhart now works for San Francisco’s Electronic Frontier Foundation, doing research and advocacy work on consumer privacy, surveillance and security issues. Yet she still uses Facebook and has no plans to delete her account.

“When it comes to technology, I’m not in the business of ditching it,” she said. “I’m all about user choice, so if deleting Facebook makes sense for you, then you should. But it doesn’t make sense for most people. It’s a massive social platform, sometimes the only or the best way to be in touch. It might be the only way to do business if your professional career depends on it.”

On a practical level, she wrote a step-by-step guide last week, showing how people can change their settings to opt out of the social network.

But she believes Facebook needs more of a systemwide change to help secure members’ information. “You shouldn’t have to be a settings wizard,” she said. “Don’t make the users do it.”

In 2014, Facebook apologized to Sister Roma, one of dozens of drag queens who protested the social network’s insistence that they use their real names, not their drag names. The fight wasn’t about privacy, “it was about our right to self-identify and the difference between ‘real’ names and authentic identity,” she said in an email.

“As the issue gained international attention, it became clear that there are millions of people who use the site with pseudonyms and other chosen names for their own privacy and safety,” she said. “School teachers, mental health care workers, artists, poets, sex workers, survivors of domestic abuse and members of the transgender community are just some examples of people who wish to conceal their legal names for a myriad of justifiable reasons.”

Although Facebook never agreed to let people use fake names, “we did get them to better understand how my community identifies and uses the site,” Sister Roma said.

However, she noted, “it was often suggested that they were so concerned with collecting identification and people’s legal names because that information is valuable. Now it seems that this is exactly one of the reasons that they are so diligent and insistent about people using their ‘real’ (i.e. legal) names.”

Sister Roma remains active on Facebook and doesn’t plan to leave “because it’s still very important to me and the work I do as an activist, fundraiser and an entertainer.”

However, the scandal is “frightening on many levels. But there are still so many questions. What I do know is that I’m not taking any more online quizzes. That’s for sure!” (Cambridge Analytica, the political consulting firm at the heart of the latest privacy scandal, reportedly obtained data about millions of Facebook users through a quiz app.)

Mike Katz-Lacabe is a privacy advocate who formed his views while he and his wife were doing human rights work. His wife received death threats while working in Latin America, so restricting information about them was vital.

“I’m a reluctant Facebook user,” Katz-Lacabe said. He doesn’t use it regularly, logging on only about every two weeks.

“For any service that I use that I don’t pay for, I assume that I am the product,” he said.

He’s vigilant about his privacy, selecting the strictest possible filters. He doesn’t hit the “like” button on news articles or any posts with embedded links, though occasionally he’ll “like” a friend’s photo.

He’s never taken a survey or quiz and doesn’t post pictures from the locations where he’s traveling. He’s told his teenage children, who prefer Instagram and Snapchat, to do the same.

His wife, Margarita, doesn’t have a single picture of herself online. Her profile picture is of a margarita.

Asked why he stays on Facebook, he laughed. “Because everybody else does, and because it’s the easiest way to share photos and family stuff.”

Susie Kameny teaches technology to K-5 students at Sanchez Elementary School in San Francisco. She does something that’s not uncommon for teachers: She has one Facebook account under her full name, which students can friend and which she uses rarely, and one personal Facebook account under what she says is a variant of her name.

“I do that to be available so there is a social media presence,” Kameny said.

The district encourages teachers to use social media, she said. But it can go wrong. At another school where she worked, a principal encouraged her to go on Instagram.

“Within an hour of being on it, kids were showing me photos of the principal in a bathing suit on the beach, and because they were middle schoolers they thought that was really funny,” she said.

The principal had no idea what the students were doing, she said.

Kameny teaches a professional development course about cybersecurity for teachers. “I always start by asking them to Google themselves so they realize what their digital footprint is, and a lot of them are really surprised,” she said.

She also tries to teach students to be careful about privacy and security online, starting with not sharing passwords.

Sometimes students have managed to find her other Facebook account, but she just deletes their requests.

Gordon is not his real name, and he doesn’t even want his full fake Facebook name printed to protect his privacy.

“I don’t want my name all over the place so people can look it up and harass me or track me,” he said. “Another thing is I just don’t trust social media. You don’t get anything for free, and there’s a price for being on Facebook.”

Being a stickler for privacy is a generational thing, he said. He’s in his 60s, and “most guys my age just don’t get on Facebook.”

He uses Facebook only for some news and information, mainly about baseball. He rarely posts anything, and his profile, which lists him as a San Francisco resident, contains no information about where he’s worked.

“I don’t want to have something I say on Facebook come back to haunt me at my job,” he said.

She graduated from Yale in 2017 with a degree in English. Before joining The Chronicle, Haigney had internships at The New York Times and The Boston Globe, where she covered arts and culture. She was also an editor of and occasional contributor to the travel magazine Off Assignment.